She’s at it again, most recently coming under fire for proposing the obligatory registering of pregnancies and government authorisation of abortions to check female foeticide/sex selective abortions (activists and the media here tend to use the former term in order to attract the public’s attention to the severity of the issue, but I will attempt to be consistent in using the latter in light of the misuse of the term by the religious right in the US). Of course there is a backlash against the invasion of privacy and female bodily integrity, but Chowdhury asserts that women rarely have these things to begin with. Certainly not if girl children aren’t even allowed to be born and become women; they must first be ‘protected’ by the state.
A major problem with this thinking, however, is the assumption that the state actually has the power, political backing and resources to implement such a programme, which is highly unlikely here. An additional issue is that in a country where so few women have adequate health care in the first place, often because male heads of household do not authorise it, this plan could actually further impede women from getting adequate attention for fear of being tracked by the authorities, in addition to her family.
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